RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyu-law-students-vote-to-oust-bar-association-president-who-blamed-israel-for-hamas-attack-tore-down-hostage-posters/

The New York University School of Law student body has voted to remove Ryna Workman from her post as president of the university’s Student Bar Association (SBA), according to an email sent to the student body Monday and obtained by National Review.

The online vote, which was triggered by a “no confidence” petition signed by 25 percent of the student body, closed Wednesday after being held open for a week. Of the 1,176 students who voted, 707 said Workman should not remain in office, while 428 voted to retain Workman and 41 abstained.

Workman first made headlines with an October 10 message in an NYU Law newsletter blaming Israel for Hamas’s October 7 massacres.

“I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination,” she wrote. “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/26/campus_dysfunction_easy_to_recognize_difficult_to_cure_150112.html

Machiavelli observes in “The Prince” that politics presents challenges akin to those physicians sometimes face: “… in the beginning of the illness it is easy to cure and difficult to recognize, but in the progress of time, when it has not been recognized and treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to recognize and difficult to cure.” So too for higher education in America: At this late date, our universities’ dysfunction – and the damage to the nation it has wrought – has become easy to recognize, but curing the dysfunction has become difficult.

The Hamas jihadists’ Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel may have provoked a watershed moment for higher education in America. Student and faculty expressions of solidarity with the mass murderers, university administrators’ initial confusion and missteps, and the eruption of antisemitism on campus compelled many who have long averted their eyes to confront our universities’ role in fanning the flames of division and discord. However, since most university administrators, professors, wealthy donors, left-of-center commentators, and politicians of both parties have allowed the dysfunction to progress for decades without calling higher education to account or warning the public, only dramatic and costly interventions provide hope at this point of remedying the cluster of pathologies ravaging America’s universities.

Evidence that it is now permissible to speak in polite society about the dire state of our universities comes from the New York Times opinion page. Since Oct. 7, the Times has published several pieces declaring that our universities have gone badly astray and proposing measures to repair them.

These opinions are welcome, but tardy by several decades. They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-inside-story-of-how-palestinians-took-over-the-world/

The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel.

It was around the time of the Oslo Accords. I had been hired by the Ford Foundation to create a marketing institute for their grantees in the country. Ford was funding the operations of both Jewish and Arab organizations within the Israeli green line, in an effort to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.

Ford put me in partnership with a young Israeli woman, Debra London. (Debra, now one of my closest friends, has just been selected to head up fundraising for the rebuilding of Kibbutz Be’eri.) She and I drew up a plan to interview each of the grantees, as well as Israeli ad agencies and media firms. While we wanted to learn about the grantees, we also planned to secure free marketing work and media to be an essential part of the institute.

When we interviewed the Jewish organizations, the atmosphere was almost giddy with hope, possibility and belief in Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. Each organization we interviewed talked excitedly about peace and co-existence, a flourishing economy among both the Jews and the Palestinians, collaborative projects and interchanges.

But when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

I tried to explain to my fellow Jewish liberals that we — the Jews and the Arabs — were having two very separate conversations. We were talking “peace.” They were talking “independence.” But as the weeks of interviews progressed, I found the Arab organizations were talking about a whole lot more.

I asked hard questions of both the Jews and Arabs in the interviewing process. With the Arab organizations, when I brought up any  sensitive, and not-so-sensitive, issues—like terrorism, cooperation and even budget—the interviewee would slam on the brakes.

And then from each organization, the same words were spoken: “When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to.

Finally, Debra and I arrived at the offices of Itijaa. Skinny, bespectacled, young Ameer Makhoul emerged from his office, took a look at me and said, “So this is the Gary Wexler who has been asking all the questions.” And then he ticked off every question I had asked along with the name of each person I had posed the question to.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-professor-relegated-to-remote-teaching-after-criticizing-hamas-in-front-of-pro-palestinian-students/

The University of Southern California relegated economics professor John Strauss to a remote-teaching position after he denounced Hamas in front of students.

Strauss, who is a Jewish supporter of Israel, is barred from holding classes on campus for the rest of the fall semester. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is speaking out on behalf of Strauss, so that other professors don’t have to face the same treatment.

“By requiring Professor Strauss to teach remotely for the remainder of the semester, USC has violated its own clear commitments to protect faculty free speech,” FIRE program officer Jessie Appleby told National Review. “Universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry and debate, but debate is impossible without the freedom to disagree and dissent — even when disagreement might be upsetting to others.”

On November 9, Strauss criticized Hamas terrorists as he was walking past pro-Palestinian student protesters for the second time that Thursday. The professor remarked, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”

One of the protesters posted a deceptively edited video which took the last sentence out of context, making it appear as if Strauss wished all Palestinians would die. He attested he wasn’t advocating for that.

A longer clip showed the exchange in full.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/heather-macdonald-at-restoration-when-race-trumps-merit/

If anybody’s surprised by the depravity, the moral depravity that’s been coming out of American institutions, educational institutions for the last three weeks, may I say, on behalf of David Horowitz, I told you so. For decades, David has warned that the universities had become the purveyor of lies, not the seeker of truth. David has warned that Islamism and its intersectional variants was becoming as ingrained in academic life as the classical canon once was. And that was a very long time ago in a golden era. The lie currently before us is that it is Israel that is the rights violator in the Middle East. Well, we can test this easily enough. Try holding a gay pride march in Gaza.

Vast swatches of the professoriate and administrators believe that four-year-olds should be told about the fun that awaits them if they declare themselves members of the opposite sex. Well, again, try that in a madrassas and see how far you get. Timeless antisemitism plays a large role in the disgusting spectacle of pro-Hamas demonstrations that we’ve been seeing on college campuses and in city streets. But something more recent and bigger is also at play, and that is hatred towards the Judeo-Christian civilization and a will to self cancelation on the part of elite members of that civilization; that hatred towards the West has become the primary export of the American University into the world at large. This morning I’m going to speak about a key falsehood that emanates from the self-annihilation of the West, and that is the claim that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racism and white supremacy. This claim has been percolating in American universities for a long time, but after the George Floyd race riots, it became a universal charge among elite institutions from big law to big business to big stem. Museums, conservatories, orchestras, scientific journals, criminal justice leaders all loudly took up the charge that any racial disparity is the product of discrimination against blacks.

Let me give you some examples. Medicine, if any medical school does not have 13% black medical students and 13% black professors, it is by definition a racist medical school. Cancer research labs, alzheimer’s research labs—if they don’t have 13% black oncologists or black neurologists, they’re racist labs. Gifted and talented programs, those of you from the West know about shutting down, getting rid of the exams in Lowell High School. We’ve seen this in Thomas Jefferson, New York City; Stuyvesant is facing a constant charge: it’s racist because its student bodies are not 13% black. This is a long standing one coming up: the teachers licensing exam, police licensing exam, firing of fire departments. If they don’t have 13% black members, they are racist. I’ve been talking about underrepresentation. The same argument applies with overrepresentation above all else in the criminal justice system. If blacks make up more than 13% of our prison population, that’s because the criminal justice system is by definition racist. If blacks are more than 13% of students in high school and in grammar schools who are disciplined for insubordination, for violence, that is because teachers hilariously the most liberal profession in the country, are racist against black students.

So what is the solution in the eyes of the elites to these criminal and racist disparities? It is to throw out the standards, the color-blind standards that are resulting in the lack of disparities. Medical schools: after the second year of medical school students take something called Step one of the U.S. medical licensing exam. Well, step 1 did not have proportional numbers of people scoring well. Because of academic mismatch, because of racial preferences, black medical students were at the bottom of the step 1 score scale. So what do we do? We get rid of grades. We decided last year that we would no longer grade step 1 of the medical licensing exam, but go to a pass-fail basis so that residents choosing their residencies after the second year would not know where students stood on the academic curve. The MCATs, the standardized exams to get into medical school, they have already been rejiggered to try to reduce disparate impact. A quarter of the questions now deal with social issues, with psychology. It has not worked. Black college seniors are still at the absolute bottom of the MCAT scores. So what we’re doing now in many schools is that we’re waiving MCAT submissions for black college seniors applying to medical schools.